U.S. Citizenship Act: Long Overdue, More To Be Done
Cleveland, OH – Lynn Tramonte, Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, reacts to introduction of the U.S. Citizenship Act in Congress by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Representative Linda Sanchez (D-CA).
Legislative text was just released and additional analysis remains to be done, but the following aspects immediately stand out.
Citizenship for 11 million aspiring Americans.
Creating a “path to citizenship” for aspiring Americans is a vital change and long overdue. For decades, immigrants without papers have been carrying out the responsibilities of citizenship–working hard, raising families, buying homes, and paying taxes–with none of the rights. Some Ohio employers use immigrant bodies’ like machines; some members of the Ohio legislature try to deny them protections when injured on the job. Racial profiling by state and local police is rampant. The Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles tried to deny driver’s licenses to children of immigrants because of their parents’ citizenship status. The Detroit Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office and Customs and Border Protection carry out family separations like it’s their job. It is not.
Immigrants have the same human dignity and deserve the same rights as any other person. The status quo simply cannot be justified. A path to full citizenship is the only way forward.
Deported Ohioans’ chance to come home.
Permanent banishment from one’s home, family, job, and community is an extreme, unfair consequence for a civil violation. But that, in a nutshell, is deportation. Many Ohio families, including those with young children, are suffering because of this. The U.S. Citizenship Act includes a way for people who were deported by the Trump Administration to potentially come home. It also addresses provisions in the law that block spouses of U.S. citizens from obtaining green cards, if they had ever been undocumented. Obscure provisions enacted in the 1990s were meant to punish immigrants, and ended up hurting entire families, long-term. Regardless of which president deported you, you deserve to come home.
More to be done: changing the U.S. immigration paradigm from one of coercion and control to human dignity and proportionality.
There are numerous other positive provisions in this bill, including expanding the diversity visa program and alternatives to detention; requiring the U.S. government to respect a court’s decision to expunge or vacate a conviction; and other changes to the consequences of a racist criminal legal system. But even if this bill becomes law, the underlying rationale of the Immigration and Nationality Act will still be coercion and control, not human dignity and proportionality. The bill does not end immigration detention, an inhumane and unnecessary construct. It does not fully separate immigration consequences from the criminal legal system. It does layer discretionary waivers onto a system rooted in white supremacy, to make it more palatable. That’s like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound, when we need systemic reform.
Bill text is the first step–where is the law?
We’ve seen immigration bills introduced in Congress before. The question is not whether a politician can write a bill, it’s whether Congress will do its job and pass it. So far, no members of the Ohio congressional delegation have signed on to cosponsor the U.S. Citizenship Act, and that is a problem. We look forward to seeing their names added in the coming days, and to working with reasonable politicians from both parties to turn this text into law.
Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the White House for the first time in years. We will know if immigrants’ humanity is a priority for the Party when we see the outcome of the U.S. Citizenship Act.
Recommended Reading: “A New Paradigm for Humane and Effective Immigration Enforcement” by Peter Markowitz for the Center for American Progress, November 2020.
Follow the Ohio Immigrant Alliance on Facebook and Twitter @tramontela
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